My First English Post

I'm migrating from my existing website to this site (www.9d3k3n.com), as I'm preparing to use the former website for my own business in the near future. I tried using Squarespace (Japanese ver.) during the free trial period and found it very easy to use. That impulsively led me to sign up for an annual contract.

I will write about the reason I decided to switch from Wordpress to Squarespace another time, but so far, setting things up has gone surprisingly smoothly. (It appears possible to sell digital products and custom products, so I’m thinking I might try that someday if the opportunity arises.)

More than ten years ago, I used a blogging service called Posterous based in San Francisco. With no ads at all, an extremely simple design, and easy-to-understand posting and settings, it was ideal. But Posterous was acquired by Twitter and the service was shut down; then Twitter became 'X' and things got worse.

Social media has always felt tedious and incompatible to me. I prefer the old-fashioned style of personal sites that are isolated, with almost no interactive features. That way, I’m not caught up in things being randomly spread to countless people, distracted by "likes", or restricted by the inflexible nature of social platforms regarding user posts.

I’ve set things up so that, like X (formerly Twitter, uh plz change its name, X !), I can quietly post my idle thoughts on individual pages (in Japanese) whenever I feel like 'muttering to myself'. These days, perhaps because of age, I don’t really mind sharing my opinions online under my real name anymore. That’s still not very common here in Japan. Still, it would be pretty embarrassing if my parents or relatives found my posts, so for sensitive topics, I may write on Medium, or maybe other platforms under an alias.

I’ll continue tweaking this site as needed, but for now, there are no big changes planned.

Lately, I’ve found it increasingly satisfying to put my thoughts into words and type them out.

── Norifumi Kudeken